PowerShell output with color redirected to file

Question

dir color output to file

If I run the following command on Ubuntu:

dharmatech@dharmatech-01:/tmp$ pwsh -Command 'dir' > out.txt

and then cat the output:

dharmatech@dharmatech-01:/tmp$ cat out.txt

the colors are rendered:

The colors are represented in out.txt as escape codes:

Write-Host colors

Here I'm using Write-Host to display text in red:

However, if I redirect output to a file, we can see that this time the colors are not represented in the resulting file:

Question

Is there a way to get the colors in the file in the Write-Host case as they are with the dir command?

Answer 1

This should be possible since Powershell 7.2, as it has support for ANSI colors. Credit for this goes to an earlier answer.

As for an example (Powershell 7.3.3. / MacOS, YMMV):

$PsStyle.OutputRending = "Ansi"
$s = Get-ChildItem | Select -First 3 | Out-String
Set-Content -path foo.txt $s
Get-Content ./foo.txt # prints out colored output

Examining the file with, say, vi displays the Ansi color codes:

...
^[[32;1mUnixMode   User     Group     LastWriteTime    Size   Name^[[0m
^[[32;1m--------   -        -----     -------------    ----   ----^[[0m
...

Answer 2

Here's one approach using the script command from bsdutils:

This is based on this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/27399198/268581

Use case

As an aside, by combining this approach with terminal-to-html:

https://github.com/buildkite/terminal-to-html

I'm able to render arbitrary colored PowerShell output as HTML.

Here's a screenshot which renders output from this PowerShell script as HTML:

https://github.com/dharmatech/net-liquidity.ps1